by Tim Tigner
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Links
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Author's Note
Free Book Link
About the Author
FLASH
TIM TIGNER
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Tim Tigner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, please address Vontiv Publishing via vontiv.com
For more information on this novel or Tim Tigner’s other thrillers, please visit timtigner.com
This novel is dedicated to the Beta Readers from my early years: John Chaplin, Christophe Martin, Janet Nelch, Cheryl Rennecker, Elena Tigner, Gwen Tigner, Rob Tigner, Steve Tigner, and Mark Tower, with everlasting gratitude.
FLASH
Also by Tim Tigner
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Chapter 1
Troy awoke to the sound of screaming. That was not unusual for a combat surgeon, but hearing soprano was.
He opened his eyes to utter blackness and a monster headache. What the hell was going on? His memory was failing him and he felt oddly unsure of … anything.
He self-diagnosed a concussion, but sensed that it was the least of his woes.
This premonition proved correct a moment later when he tried to sit up—but could not. A cold steel ceiling pressed down on his left shoulder. He also felt walls abutting his back, head and feet. As Troy strained to wrap his mind around his baffling predicament, his nose upped the ante.
Hesitant fingers groped to confirm the stench.
He was lying in a pool of blood.
Troy knew that this was the moment most people would begin to scream and flail, their fight and flight reflexes tripping all over one another. He remained motionless. Analyzing. He had learned at a very young age the wisdom of lying low and keeping quiet. In orphanages things had usually worked out better that way. In the army they still did.
He reached a steady hand into the darkness before him. Cool flesh met his bloody fingers just inches from his face. He had found the bleeder—or at least one of them. He checked the flabby neck for a pulse just to be sure. Definitely dead. “Better and better,” Troy whispered to himself.
Another soprano salvo erupted from the darkness, making his heartstrings resonate. Those were not wails of pain he realized, but cries of fear.
“Hold on! I’m coming,” he shouted back. Troy did not know if he was coming, of course. Aside from being boxed up with a corpse he had no idea where he was or how to get out. But he knew that hope had a power all its own. Best to offer it for now and figure the rest out later.
The screaming stopped. Then the box shook with a familiar rhythm. The motion snapped the puzzle pieces into place. He was in the trunk of a car.
The sound of an opening car door confirmed his hypothesis.
Troy strained his ears.
“Who said that?” A woman asked, her voice soft but clear.
Troy stifled his habitual Captain Troy response, giving his alternative title instead. “Doctor Troy. I’m in the trunk. Are you in danger?”
“I’m not at a party. What are you doing in there?”
For a dumb question, that was a really good one. “I have absolutely no idea. Ask the Taliban. But please let me out first.”
The woman remained silent for what seemed an eternity. He appreciated her dilemma. Curtain A or curtain B; the proverbial lady or the tiger. Picturing her trying to decide, he realized that if he got lucky and she pulled the trunk release rather than running off, his appearance might send her over the edge. He would look more like a feasting vampire than a valiant knight as he leapt to her rescue. Granted, she did not seem to be expecting a fairytale moment, but he decided not to risk it and added, “Don’t be scared by what you see.”
More silence ended with a cautious, “What do you mean?”
“I’m not at my best. I’m really much more charming than my present appearance might suggest.”
The car jiggled some more and then the trunk sprang open with a thwang and a woosh. Brave woman, Troy thought, scrambling to climb out before she caught sight of the corpse.
“Freeze!”
Freeze was a command one quickly learned to respect when working in a country rife with landmines. Troy turned his muscles to stone, but shifted his eyes toward the source of the command. What he saw both pleased and disappointed him. A petite beauty stood by the passenger door, knees bent slightly in a classic shooter’s stance, revolver leering at him from between two steady hands. She wore a white blouse, pink shorts, and white tennis shoes—all spattered with blood. Definitely not Taliban, but hardly Cinderella either.
They were in the corner of a parking garage illuminated only by emergency lighting. As he
raised his hands up slowly over his head, Troy scanned the shadows cast by concrete pillars and parked cars. They appeared to be alone.
“I’m frozen,” he said, trying to sound disarming.
She stared at him in silence.
He stared right back at her. It was not unpleasant. She was short, and slender everywhere a woman was supposed to be, while generously rounded on top. He was not sure how his mind could focus on attributes like that at a time like this, but it did and he was glad for it. Stop to smell the roses and all that.
She spoke at last. “You’re all covered in blood.”
“You noticed that too,” Troy said. “But then it appears that you use the same designer.”
She did not look down at herself. No doubt the sight of her blood-spattered blouse was what had initially sparked her screams.
Troy did look down in an attempt to appear less threatening only to find himself out of uniform. That was odd, but not his chief concern. Priority number one was pacifying the pixie with the gun pointed at his chest. Hardware aside, she did not look like a killer, but then mental illness could be a master of disguise. Looking back up he said, “It’s not my blood,” and motioned toward the trunk with his head. “Speaking of which, would you mind putting your finger outside the trigger guard?”
Tinkerbell craned her long neck to glance into the trunk but then looked quickly away. “What happened? Who is he?” She asked, her arms starting to tremble. Her finger still on the trigger.
“I’m a bit curious about that myself,” Troy said, deciding to focus on the latter question first. “His uniform looks a bit like Marine dress blues, less the jacket. But he’s much too … squishy to be a jarhead, and that’s not the Marine crest on his shoulder boards. Mind if I take a closer look? We’ve been sleeping together and I don’t even know his name.”
“Don’t move!” She said.
“Sounds like you’ve got my headache,” Troy replied. “I woke up with a real humdinger.”
His comment mollified her expression. “Me too,” she said. Then she beckoned with the gun. “Go ahead and have a look.”
Troy pivoted back toward the trunk and went to work. The shoulder joint creaked as he moved the corpse’s arm out of the way, indicating that rigor was setting. Troy knew that meant he’d been dead for three to four hours. Nice to have a timeline. For the moment he had little else.
He spotted two bloody holes and a nametag on the corpse’s chest. “His nametag reads Evan Johnson, Detective Sergeant. That’s an imperial police rank.”
“Imperial?”
“As in British empire. A number of those former colonies are part of the coalition.”
Her look did not telegraph comprehension, but Troy returned to the search anyway.
Evan was not wearing his utility belt, so he had no handcuffs, nightstick, or phone. Troy could guess where his handgun was—as well as two of its bullets. Still concerned about the possibility of experiencing the third, he kept his movements slow and steady before the woman.
He slid his hand gingerly into Evan’s front right pocket and pulled out a set of car keys—Fords, like the car. Next he reached around and pulled Evan’s wallet from his back pocket. He flipped it open and read from the identification card. “Detective Sergeant Evan Johnson, Royal Cayman Islands Police. Boy is this guy a long way from home.” Troy realized the obvious as he spoke. “But then, so are we I suppose.”
“What do you mean, we’re a long way from home?” Tinkerbell asked.
Troy turned back toward her. “Judging by your alabaster skin, green eyes, and state of dress, I’m guessing you weren’t born in Afghanistan.”
“What does Afghanistan have to do with anything?”
The look of sincere confusion on her face gave Troy pause. “Where do you think we are?”
“South L.A., I’m guessing.”
“As in Los Angeles?”
“Of course.”
Troy felt his stomach begin to constrict. He reached for his own billfold but found his pockets empty. He reopened Evan’s wallet and pulled four bills and a receipt from the main compartment. The bills were twenty-Cayman-dollar notes.
He took a step back to study the other cars in the garage. All had RCIP logos and right-side steering wheels. Strike two.
His stomach shrank to the size of a walnut.
“What is it?” The woman asked.
Troy ignored her and turned his attention to Evan’s petrol receipt. Between juvenile detention and foreign tours, medical school and war, Troy had encountered some of the worst humanity had to offer. Nothing he’d seen had shaken him like the flimsy piece of paper he now held in his hand.
The woman spoke again, but all Troy heard was fuzzy background noise.
Not wanting to believe his eyes, he retrieved Evan’s identity card in hopes of finding contrary information. Confirmation greeted him instead. Strike three.
Feeling dizzy, he turned his attention back to the petrol receipt. He mouthed the words as if testing to see if they were real. Thirty liters, forty-eight Cayman dollars, September third, two thousand … eight.
He had not just forgotten the last few hours.
He was missing seven years.
Chapter 2
Emmy watched the man’s face pale as he studied a document from the dead cop’s wallet. “Will you kindly tell me what it is?” She repeated.
He continued to ignore her, even though she was the one holding the gun. She was holding the gun, Emmy repeated to herself. What was going on? Ten minutes ago she had awoken in the front seat of a cop car with the worst headache of her life, a huge silver pistol in her lap, blood-spatter all over her blouse, and no idea what had happened. Then some guy locked in the trunk and claiming to be a doctor told her to “ask the Taliban.” Was he insane … or was she?
Now she watched wide-eyed as he pulled his shirttails out of his shorts and began inspecting his own stomach. Drug-addict was her first assumption, but his washboard abs belied the user life. When he wiped the blood from his flesh, she saw his jagged scar. It looked like the doctor had once removed his own appendix with a pocketknife. He spread the skin taut around the scar and poked at it as though trying to confirm its authenticity. Then he looked away and sank to his knees.
“What is it? What did you find?” She asked.
After a long tense silence he regained his feet and locked her gaze with disbelieving eyes.
She tried to read his thoughts but found only confusion.
“Will you answer one simple question for me?” He asked.
She wanted to say, “Hey buddy, how about answering my question first?” But his grave expression caused her to nod in silence.
“What year is it?”
She knew then and there that she should run. She had hoped that the doctor would have some answers, be her defender, ally, and guide out of this mess. But he was talking gibberish. Still, something in those cobalt blues gave her pause.
She took a moment to analyze him as she would a client—from the outside in. He wore an olive safari shirt, khaki cargo shorts hanging from a silver-buckled belt, and running shoes. Practicality was clearly his chief wardrobe concern, but he knew what style fit him. Definitely ex-military. An officer.
At about six feet, he was taller than eighty-eight percent of his peers and would be accordingly overconfident. He was fit and broad of shoulder. A man’s man, used to command. A ladies man, used to getting his way. His face was handsome, but marred. Two angry v-shaped scars peeked down from above the thick dark hairline over his right eye. Probably a war wound. Possibly an accident. Definitely traumatic.
His most distinctive feature was a big dimple in the center of his chin. It reminded her of the actor who played Spartacus. But unlike Spartacus, she noted, violence was not Troy’s default reaction. He used humor to diffuse tension.
He was college educated, highly intelligent—although quite possibly demented, and a wisecrack. She put the odds that he was a doctor at fifty percent.
“What year is it?” He repeated.
She decided to chance a few seconds more to see where this was going. Keeping the gun pointed straight at his chest, she said, “It’s 2002. June fifteenth or sixteenth.”
“You’re sure it’s not November 2001?”
“I’m sure,” she said, backing up a step.
“Or September 2008?”
“What’s this about?”
“Check out your reflection,” he said. “You can still keep the gun on me if you want, but crouch down behind the car door and take a good look at your face in the side mirror.”
“Why?” She asked. “What would I be looking for?”
He stepped forward until the barrel of her pistol pressed into his chest. Then he held the receipt up before her eyes while placing his free hand softly on her shoulder. “Six lost years.”
Chapter 3
The woman seemed to spend forever staring into the patrol car’s side mirror. When she finally straightened back up to look at him, her posture drooped. The Colt dangled from her arm like a burdensome weight. Tinkerbell had run out of pixie dust.
She looked blankly in his general direction, tears flowing freely down her troubled face. Despite his own problems, despite their impending peril, Troy’s predominant emotion was the urge to wrap her in his comforting arms. He was glad to find his hormones still working at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, but resisted the chivalrous impulse nonetheless. When a patient was in shock, it was best to tread lightly. Then there was the gun.
She opened and closed her jaw a few times before producing any sound. When at last she managed, her voice was but a whisper. “Two-thousand eight. Are you sure? This can’t be.”
“My last memory is taking shrapnel from an Afghan IED. Now I have a scar that’s long healed. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I don’t know. Nothing as crazy as a terrorist bomb. Business as usual I guess. I’m having trouble remembering. Everything feels hazy … forced.”
“I feel the same,” He said.
“Six years … Is that possible, doctor?”
“Medically speaking, yes. But it’s highly improbable.”
